I switched to the “New navigation” shortly after it came out. After some adjusting, I found that it was very useful - especially the “Pinned” option.
One feature I made use of constantly was the ability to click on the project name on the top left and quickly select another project from a drop-down. This suddenly seems to have gone away for some reason. On the original navigation it was just as easy to switch projects by clicking the hamburger menu and going to Frequently Visited, but I preferred the “New navigation”.
It’s very difficult to get to get used to a navigation UI, and then have it suddenly change. For now I’ll have to go back to the Original navigation.
Question to the community: Is the “New navigation” meant to be an alpha test that will constantly change, or is it meant to be the future direction of the navigation?
Here is the related GitLab issue comment: 📣 GitLab New Navigation - Feedback issue (#409005) · Issues · GitLab.org / GitLab · GitLab There hasn’t been an official explanation yet, but it seems to be a very new bug (or (bad) feature?).
I know that “no one likes navigation redesign”, but you’re not making things easy if you remove things we start getting used to from one release to an other without any notice (and remove at the same time the “provide feedback” button). It took me literally hours to understand what was going on and find a place to get some sort of explanation and eventually give a feedback. I was rather pleased with the new navigation and how changes are rolled out and I’ve been using it for months (to the point I almost forgot I could switch back and how to find my way in the old). But that one as gotten me quite mad.
The “search” button which opens a modal for super_extraterrestrial_power_users in the middle of the screen, miles away from your current mouse pointer position and where you actually find the links to switch context (I thought I was searching…) is as far as I’m concerned a perfect example of what NOT to to do to make a site usable.
I know this is a long and hard work and that you cannot be perfect on each release. But please consider your users when making such a huge braking changes. Moreover I do hope you have some sort of plan to roll back or release something that will bring back an experience as close to the one we’ve been using for months which was, if not perfect, totally acceptable.
Thanks.